Catching Fog

The Trouble with Tribbles is one of my favorite episodes from the original Star Trek. Captain Kirk is focused on an issue with the Klingons. Meanwhile, cute round fuzzy balls that purr have started reproducing and thereby become another problem—but only temporarily. In the end, the tribbles solve Kirk’s problem with the Klingons.

Life is like that sometimes. There are always problems, most minor, occasionally major, and sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s a big problem and what isn’t. And the number of problems that come our way are seemingly endless. What we wouldn’t do to be free from the stress!

As the old joke would put it: take my week. Please.

First, the main water line to my house broke on Monday morning: roots. I spent the day digging down to the break, sawing roots, and making multiple trips to Home Depot. I also scraped my arms and my fingers ached for days.

Recently I discovered an email from an “agent” offering to represent me. A quick search with Google confirmed my suspicion that this individual was a con artist. Legitimate agents find work for their clients and take a percentage of the money made. Con artists ask for money up front for “reading fees” and “office expenses” and the like. This agent was the fee charging sort. It is annoying to find that at this point in my career, I still attract that sort of person. Especially since I already have an agent. A real one.

My oldest daughter rescued a stray cat that then had kittens in my garage. We’ve found homes for three out of the four kittens and even one for the mommy cat. Yesterday she went into heat. She is now overly enamored with me. She also keeps trying to get into our house from the garage and this evening scared my middle daughter when it came bounding into the kitchen.

Then there are the bills that need paying. And my oldest daughter is leaving for her Junior year of college in August. Did I mention bills needing to be paid? College is expensive and every time I turn around, there seems to be something else unexpected that I need to pay. My wife and I have been married thirty years; our anniversary is on June 25th. But with all the expenses, I was despairing of finding anyway to do anything to celebrate the milestone. We’d be lucky to even scrounge enough together to go to McDonalds.

In the midst of things going wrong it is very easy to start berating oneself. Especially when one has a history of depression. Not that a depressed person needs help becoming depressed or that depression is the consequence of events. But stress can be a trigger if one has a habit of negative thoughts.

Obviously, curling up into a fetal position is the wrong way to deal with trouble. Instead, one needs to focus on each problem, one at a time, recognize the challenge, and then act to fix it. The solution is not always pleasant, it is not always the ideal, it isn’t always what one wants, but it is what one has to do.

And in the midst of any trouble, big or small—and sometimes it feels as if the little daily stresses are the worst—it is important to look up from the muck and see the bigger picture. When faced with a black mark on a white sheet of paper, it is hard to recognize that the majority of the paper is still white. You have to work at reminding yourself about the things in life that are wonderful. You have trouble at work because you have a job. Without a job you wouldn’t have the job stresses, but is not having a job really what you want?

Just because something bad happens to you, it doesn’t mean that you’re a loser. And if your mistakes do seem to overwhelm, then seek help. If you had a broken arm, you wouldn’t be slow to find a doctor. And talk to your friends and your family. Don’t try to carry it all by yourself. The burden is always lighter if you’re not alone. A friend called me on Tuesday wondering why I hadn’t asked him for help when my water pipe broke. I had been so focused on trying to fix the pipe, I didn’t even think about trying to get help.

Of course my week had other things in it besides the troubles. Sunday night our friends and family gave my wife and I a surprise party for our 30th wedding anniversary: and it really was a complete surprise, utterly unexpected. Somehow my children and friends kept it all a secret and we didn’t suspect a thing until everyone shouted “surprise.” We had a great time, and we even got gift cards to several restaurants and a movie theater. Not only did we get to actually celebrate our 30 years together, we also will get to go out together a few times in the coming weeks, something we might not otherwise have gotten to do.

So that was a much better surprise than finding water bubbling in one’s front yard on Monday morning. It helps keep the troubles in perspective, and to remind us that all is not lost.

However, that cat is still in heat.

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Sunday evening our friends and family gave my wife and I a surprise party for our 30th wedding anniversary; our actual anniversary will occur on Tuesday, June 25. Apparently this party had been in the planning stages since April. Even our children where in on it. My wife and I had no clue and were completely flabbergasted. We had a wonderful time.

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A couple of years ago my then nearly eighty year old father (who is now 81) was diagnosed with lung cancer, despite the fact that he had never smoked a day in his life. Perhaps, it’s the result of his career in the Air Force and his exposure to many years of second-hand smoke, back in the days when smoking was far more common in the workplace than it is now. Or, it could just be one of those things: cancer is not always the result of something breathed or ingested.

He had rounds of chemotherapy and radiation therapy and ultimately was declared cancer free. It was in the midst of all of that treatment, which involved repeated visits to the hospital, that my parents’ twenty-something year old refrigerator chose to stop working. As seems to be the norm, the breakage of the devices upon which our modern lives are dependent never happen at convenient times. So on top of taking my dad to the doctor nearly every day, my mom also had to find time to go refrigerator shopping. She found a good refrigerator at a reasonable price and the whole affair was taken care of relatively easily.

It’s in the middle of real major crises that problems you otherwise might think of as major crises suddenly drop into their proper perspective. Although a dead refrigerator is an enormous inconvenience, there really are worse things and more important things.

It reminded me of an incident from over ten years ago. My wife and I had just been informed that the lengthy and expensive wrongful death lawsuit against us over the SIDS death of our foster son had finally been dismissed after nearly three years of turmoil. Deciding to go out for dinner to celebrate our victory, we had a pleasant meal, the first one without stress in years—only to have the transmission in our van blow apart on the way home. It was a twelve hundred dollar problem when we didn’t have twelve hundred dollars or much of any money left at all. We wondered if eating out had been a bad idea.

Of course we had no way of knowing our transmission would die. And I was able to keep the problem in perspective. After surviving a 30 million dollar wrongful death lawsuit, a twelve hundred dollar transmission bill didn’t seem so bad.

2011 was an unusually good year for me. In September, my third book, an illustrated hardback entitled, The Bible: A Reader’s Guide, was simultaneously released in the United States and the British commonwealth nations, by separate publishers. On November 1, my fourth book, A Year with Jesus, a a large paperback daily devotional was released by Thomas Nelson Publishing. Meanwhile, my oldest daughter began college and my two younger were surviving high school. My middle daughter had just gotten her learners’ permit for driving and was enrolled in a driving school.

In the midst of all those positive things, I was unexpectedly forced to do my part to help the nation’s economy, all thanks to unexpected breakages.

Oddly enough, one of the things that chose to begin to stop working was my nearly twenty year old refrigerator, joining with my parents’ broken machine. On nearly the same day my refrigerator gave up the ghost, my wife’s sister called her to complain that her refrigerator had also decided to stop working. Apparently, if you are at all related to my family, your refrigerator was going to give up the ghost near the end of 2011.

But that’s not all! At about the same time, the also nearly twenty year old television in my bedroom decided to die in somewhat spectacular fashion. My wife had just turned on the set as we were getting ready to go to bed. I was still in my office when she told me to come to the bedroom and pointed. Our television was displaying a bright thin vertical line down the middle of the screen. As I pondered what that meant, the TV suddenly made a pair of loud pops—and our bedroom filled with the stench of burning plastic. I quickly unplugged the set.

Now, my wife and I had actually been talking about replacing the TV. Some day. As old as it was, it was obviously not a modern flat screen with high definition. But our thought had been to possibly replace it as our Christmas present to ourselves. Or when we got our tax refund in the Spring.

Thankfully, during 2011 our financial situation was healthy enough that we could afford the problems, though frankly I had not wanted to spend all that money all at once on such things–what with the then approaching autumn and winter holidays. But since we had the money, the breakages were not been so inconvenient as such things usually are. And even without the financial resources, I would hope that I could still have chosen to put the breakages in perspective and recognize that they really weren’t so significant given the bigger picture.

Life is a lot more than the stuff that so obsesses us.

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“Can I go to a friend’s house?”

The text arrived at 9 AM on the first day of class after the holidays. I’d already told my youngest daughter that she couldn’t go to anyone’s house during the week until she improved her grades.

After reminding her of that, the texts became more insistent and angry, but I stood my ground. She concluded by telling me that “you’re not my father.” Her anger was over the top, but then she’s fifteen. I didn’t take it too seriously. Later in the day, I texted her to let her know what I was thinking of making for supper. Her responses were normal.

But when I went to pick her up from school at 2:24, she didn’t come to the car. She did not respond to texts or to my phone calls.

I eventually went school security, but they were unable to locate her. A deputy sheriff at the school even drove by the friend’s house to see if she was there and she was not. Later, my wife went by the friend’s house and the girl reported that she hadn’t seen my daughter since that morning.

We tried contacting her by cellphone over the next several hours to no effect. Our cellphone company allows us to track her phone’s location—but that works only if her phone was turned on. Unfortunately, she had turned her phone off.

That evening, friends sat with us as we waited and tried to find out what was going on. We posted to Facebook and attempted to find out from her other friends if they might know where she had gone. We called the sheriff. They told us they’d send a deputy around to take a missing person’s report from us. He did not arrive for six hours: around 11:15 PM.

While the deputy was still there, the mother of one of our daughter’s friends called us to let us know that our daughter had finally responded to a text from her. Our daughter told the mom that she was at a friend’s house. But she refused to identify the friend. When I checked the phone’s location, it finally located it within about a mile of a cell tower in Lancaster. The friend whose house she had asked to visit was within that range. We wondered if the friend was hiding our daughter.

So, we went to sleep that night worried, but confident she was at that friend’s house.

The next morning, we went to the high school, wondering if our daughter would show up. She didn’t. But the friend whom we thought she was with did show up; so we realized then that she was not with the friend that she had previously asked to visit.

After we returned home, we set up a page on Facebook to further publicize that our daughter was missing and we were looking for her. We contacted various agencies and the news media. Within three hours, over four hundred people had joined the Facebook page. People volunteered to make fliers and look for her. We scheduled a meeting at our church at 5 PM for people to begin searching door to door within that mile circle where he phone was located.

My wife left for the church about 4:30. I stayed home in case she called or showed up there. Our pastor was just driving up to the house at 4:45 when I got a phone call: it was my daughter!
She’d been dropped off at a gas station and a friend of hers had found her there. She wanted me to come get her.

I called my wife to let her know. More than a hundred people had already gathered at the church to begin the search. There was much rejoicing at the news that we had found her.

Together with my pastor, I went and got my daughter. She had been without her medication for her bipolar disorder and ADHD for more than twenty-four hours by that point. I had her pills with me when I got her and she took them as soon as I picked her up. She was wearing different clothing and her hair had been dyed a different color from the day before.

So where had she been and what had happened?

The father of a friend of hers had been texting her at school that morning. He had encouraged her to leave. And so it was to that friend’s house that she had gone. While she was there, her friend had given her different clothing and had dyed her hair.

The next day, we took my daughter to meet with her therapist and her psychiatrist. Both lectured her rather sternly. And her psychiatrist increased her medication dosage to a higher level. The therapist started meeting with her twice a week instead of once a week. And her psychiatrist also met with her more frequently as well.

We put my daughter on independent study for her schooling.

It has been two years now since my daughter ran away. Her behavior has steadily improved and we’ve had no further serious incidents. Her new regimen of medication is thus far working relatively well. She is not cured. We live day to day.

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This Monday earned its reputation as being the day that killed the weekend. My wife woke me up and announced, “we have a problem.” Then she took me to the front yard and pointed: there were two large bubbles of lifted sod from which water was flowing. My wife had earlier noticed, after she’d been up for awhile, that suddenly the water pressure in the kitchen and bathroom had dropped significantly. She thought that was odd and initially wondered if the truck noises she heard outside indicated that the water company or the city were doing some sort of maintenance on the pipes.

Instead, it turned out to be much more localized. I poked at the mounds in my yard: they were squishy and very soggy. After announcing that I thought this was odd, my wife suggested I do something about it. So I shut off the water to the house and then went inside to put on my clothes and to get to work trying to figure out exactly what had gone wrong. Meanwhile, my wife left for the day to go to a teacher training on the other side of town. She’d be gone until three.

I got my shovel and started digging where the largest of the two water filled mounds had been located. The ground was very soft and easy to dig. After I’d dug some distance, I started reaching in and trying to see if I could find some sort of path from which the water might have been flowing. The hole I was digging was filled to the level of the grass with water.

So, I dug some, felt around some, and then dug some more. Based on the spot where the mound was located, my guess was that it was the main water line into the house that had sprung a leak.

I turned the water on briefly a couple of times to see where it was flowing from, and after the second time, I was finally able to locate the source of the break: my hole by then was about three feet deep and filled with water. Upon feeling around down in the muddy murk I was finally able to feel the PVC pipe of our main water line and I could also feel the break in the pipe.

My next chore, then was to empty the hole of water. This took a surprisingly long time. About half way down I finally stopped, rinsed myself off with water from my swimming pool that I scooped out into a bowl, and then went and had my breakfast and took my various medications, mostly allergy and asthma related.

Then it was back to work. I finally managed to scoop the water out and clear the pipe so I could see the break. At that point, I could see the cause of the break, too—though that wasn’t a big surprise. I have an enormous elm tree in my front yard; it’s trunk is about two and a half feet in diameter and its roots slither through my yard. I’d had experience with them before on those times I’d had to repair sprinkler lines.

So, I got out my reciprocating saw and tried sawing through the first of many roots; it was very slow going, largely because the blade was old and not really made for cutting through roots. So it was time for my first trip to Home Depot.

I found a nine inch blade designed for pruning and brought it home. It made much quicker work of that root, and several others after that. Most of these roots were about two inches in diameter. But when I got down to where the pipe was, as I moved more dirt away, I discovered that the root that had caused the break was about six inches in diameter and had partially wrapped itself around the pipe.

By then, my youngest daughter had wanted to be transported to a friend’s house, while my middle daughter had already planned to go to the water park that day with a couple of friends, so I had to let her drive me to my wife’s place of training so I could snag the van she had taken.

Back home and alone, I decided another trip to Home Depot was necessary and I secured a twelve inch blade, also designed for pruning. It still took the better part of twenty minutes sawing through two ends of the root while avoiding the pipe.

Success was mine however and I was able to move that chunk of root out of the way and clear the pipe.

By then it was time for lunch.

After lunch, it was back to work: more digging, more root cutting until at last it was time to try to fix the break in the pipe. Another trip to Home Depot to get one inch couplers and that smelly blue plastic PVC cement.

My first thought was to simply trim the break out a bit and try popping a coupler to connect the two ends. Unfortunately, that didn’t work. I tried several different methods, cutting back on the pipe. The problem was that the two ends were no longer on the same level; the root had pushed them so that they were nearly an inch off, one lower than the other.

By then, it was time to go pick up my wife from her training. Unfortunately, she had gotten done a bit early and tried to call me. Now, since I was working in mud and dirt, I had left my cellphone in the house; I wasn’t going to risk destroying it. Unfortunately, this meant my wife couldn’t get a hold of me and she decided that I must have forgotten and so she started walking. Thankfully when I got to where the training was and I discovered she wasn’t there, they let me call her cellphone from one of their phones and I found out what had happened. She had not gotten far and so I was able to pick her up.

And back home again, I continued the saga until at last I managed to get the pipe sealed. Or so I thought. When I pressurized it after letting the glue dry, it held only for about two minutes before releasing rather spectacularly. So, I went back to work; the second time I made certain that I had a better connection. When that was done, I had supper, made a trip to open our church facilities so that the Cub Scouts could use it. By then, over an hour had gone by and I was certain that the glue was dry.

When I pressurized the line, it held without problem. I happily went inside to turn the water in the kitchen sink.

Nothing came out.

I tried other faucets. No joy.

I tried turning the water to the house on and off repeatedly. Still nothing. But then the sprinklers came on and worked fine. I shut them off.

By then, my neighbor across the street wandered over and I told him our problem. He wondered if the pressure valve might have gotten clogged with some dirt. So, he showed me the bolt to loosen to open that up wider so it could clear itself of dirt and voila! Water flowed into my house.

By then it was about 8:00 and the sun was set and it was getting dark. I decided to cover the hole in my yard with boards and finish filling it on Tuesday. And then I went and took a shower and brushed my teeth for the first time that day.

And I still had an essay to do for an online news magazine that was due by 9 AM Eastern time on Tuesday, not to mention my weekly column for for the newspaper I write for. Somehow I got both things done by about 10:00 PM.

Tired. You bet. No wonder the comic strip cat Garfield hates Mondays.

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